


Digital Champions

by ToukoTai



Category: Digimon Tamers, Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Sam as a tamer, almost, digiworld and the grid as characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-06
Updated: 2014-11-06
Packaged: 2018-02-24 07:23:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2573063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToukoTai/pseuds/ToukoTai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam supposes that if he had to pick a digital plane to get trapped on, the Grid wasn't that bad. You know, compared to other digital planes out there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Digital Champions

**Author's Note:**

> this is still a rough idea I'm working on. But come on, this had to happen.

_I stand around at the digital land and no matter what I see_   
  
_Everything is comin' at me in a digital reality_

 

In 1982 Kevin Flynn first encountered the world inside computers and befriended a program named Tron. He would, after leaving this digital world, take inspiration to head the gaming and software company Encom but also create his own version of that digital world, which he called The Grid.

In 1984, a mere two years later, a group of programmers from the world over met at a college in Palo Alto and, combining their expertise, began creating a whole new digital world, with the intent to populate this world with digital life forms. In other words, create artificial intelligence the likes of which the world had never seen. These life forms were given the working title of digimon. The date of realization was set for 1987. The deadline was never to be realized. Though shut down by the university in 1986, the program was carried on by a single lone programmer from what would be known as the ‘Wild Bunch’.

In 1989 Kevin Flynn disappeared off the face of the earth. He was last seen leaving his parents’ house after a visit to his son. And was never heard from again. Also in 1989, after two years of hard work, the lone programmer from the Wild Bunch, put together a proposal to ENCOM hoping to gather backing to fully realize his dream of the digital world. He marketed it as a children’s game, since digimon in their inception borrowed heavily from video game aspects. But Encom was more interested in other software designs and as digimon entered public domain, a toy company in Japan picked up the designs and created the digimon handheld units and computer game that came after.

On the surface these two events have only a passing relation to each other, except for the fact that the lone programmer had created and sent a working prototype of the artificial intelligence unit to the Encom Company along with his proposal. Kevin Flynn left behind no explanation, no note, no accident site and no body. What he did leave behind were a giant technology company, a motorcycle and a son. The prototype unit was passed through ENCOM and then, shortly after Kevin Flynn’s disappearance, was given to his son, Sam, as a gift.

Samuel Flynn was the first child to own a digimon game, a small digital pet simulation. Sam’s digimon, which in his loneliness and grief, he lavished attention on, became an agumon.

In time the Wild Bunch’s creation went far beyond their hopes and dreams. Digimon became real, digital constructs, which were self-aware. The world the Wild Bunch had programmed, even though the project had been shut down, continued, existing in the phone lines, and then later the internet, running alongside the Earth itself. Gathering bits and pieces of data, the digiworld continued, evolving and growing. At the same time, Kevin Flynn was trapped in a digital world of his own making, but wholly different from the digiworld created by the Wild Bunch.

 

Years later, in 2010 Samuel Flynn took his first steps onto the Grid of his father and wondered how this had become his life. At his side, the agumon he had cared for, played with, talked to, and ultimately brought through the digital veil to the real world, snorted a small plume of fire, clearly unimpressed with the full sized recognizer and guards in front of them. After all, what were a few outdated static security programs to a digimon? A digimon was programmed for two things after all: to fight and to evolve. And Agumon was old by digimon reckoning. A digimon didn’t get by as long as he did, even with a tamer, without being an amazing fighter.

Clipped to his jean’s belt, Sam’s digivice was a solid, reassuring presence. As it had been for years, since it was first given to an angry, sad, lonely little boy, who had made a desperate wish, that against all probability, had come true. Sam flicked a card out of the holder nestled next to his digivice, bringing both digivice and the card up. Agumon shifted into a more battle ready position as he eyed the guards. Sam hadn’t played the card game itself in years, but the cards were essential tools to a tamer, acting as conduits for a tamer’s belief, altering and powering a digimon in relation to the strength of the belief. And a tamer had belief in spades.(Because no one, no one, believed like a Tamer) Agumon allowed himself a smirk, showcasing a maw of sharp, pointed teeth as the guard programs approached.

Sam walked away from the fiery, pixelating, wreckage of the recognizer, Agumon steadily tramping by his side. He could feel the Grid under his feet, waking up. Under the glossy surface, long dormant protocols whirred to life, lines of still code beginning to shift once again, numbers clicking over, slowly at first and then picking up speed. With every step he took, the Grid shook a little more metaphorical dust off.

It had been a long time since the Grid had felt anything even remotely similar to this. From the moment of this user’s arrival it had already begun reaching for him, and it had found more than expected: boundless energy, passion and a will that burned with a fierce unrelenting red. This user was special, ‘tamer’ was whispered to it from the foreign compact program on the User(tamer). User or tamer, it mattered not. For too long the Grid had been still. Its creator had abandoned it, refusing to fight, removing himself to the outlands, beyond the Grid’s reach. Its steward locked it in place, eliminating any changes, halting its growth. Now there was a new player, one who brought change with him, with his every step and the movement of the strange bio-program at his side. And the Grid reacted to this commanding presence.

Sam was rather surprised at how this digital world acted when compared to the other digital world he had been to. This world was rather like an over eager puppy, sitting up and begging for attention, the other one…well…

 

The long of it was this: The digiworld was ever changing. It had been programmed initially, but then it had incorporated so many different bits of data and created so many different levels of itself, that it was largely self-created. It had incorporated bits and pieces: static from the phone lines, left over information, data from the internet, scraps from all over the world, converging to add to this increasingly complex digital plane. The digital world, that ran so fast, it was faster than the real world.

It was always reinventing itself, never staying the same, always changing and ever evolving. Sam had once spent an entire week mapping out a sector, a weird haunted house type one, only to come back and find out that the sector had erased itself and a large mountain now stood where the haunted mansion had been. Because it was now made up of so many different data streams, had so many varied pieces of code from all different programmers the world over, because it had now largely built itself up from the original coding, it was its own primary user and system admin. In practice this meant that while you could, with great effort and luck, port modified digimon programs into it and you could set a watchdog program to monitor it, you couldn’t actually program it.

The digiworld laughed at your attempts to mold it. Laughed and then lit those attempts on fire and danced on the ashes. Not even the sovereigns could influence the environment of the digiworld. They could survive the worst of it, were above really anything the digiworld could throw at them, but they couldn’t change it. Sam had tried his hand at programming it on one of the first visits to the digiworld. He considered himself a decent hacker and programmer, a fully-fledged member of gen Y after all. He grew up hacking video games and the digiworld was originally modeled on a game. He knew his way around the internet, more than knew really, he was a massive shareholder in a technology company. But when he tried a simple piece of coding(creating a wooden cabin, really, how hard could that be? It was one room, one!) on the digiworld, he got the impression the virtual world was saying: “I am acknowledging that you did this but I do what I want” as the cabin flashed red, then green and exploded into bits of code that were absorbed by the forest suddenly springing up around him. Sam had decided then and there to never again try coding in the digiworld, as Agumon rumbled in the way that meant he was laughing at his tamer.

The Digiworld was a harsh place, evolve or die, fight or be deleted. But it was also a place of excitement and beauty, organic in a way that mirrored the real world.

 

The Grid, by contrast, was as different as night and day. Not the least being that the Digiworld had both a sun and a moon, while the grid had neither. The Grid was coded by a human for humans. Not as a game to play but a physical place to visit. For all their dreaming and planning, the Wild Bunch had never gone as far to think that a human would ever set foot in the digiworld. But the Grid had been built with that goal in mind. It was built and programmed to be accommodating to its Users. In fact it needed Users, it could not advance on its own.

It was centered around Users and what those Users might create. It would have listened to them, accepted their programs and codes eagerly. It was essentially, a giant sandbox. Anything was possible, anything at all. 

(Things tended to stay put in the Grid. Because once you had programmed something, you would want to be able to find it again, wouldn't you?)

The design of the place didn't try to mimic nature. It had been made in the image of a metropolis and in that image it stayed. There was nothing plant like, nothing organic looking in the bright light and dark of the city's buildings. There was nothing but the rocky outcrops of the Outlands and the dead weight of the virus ridden sea and the looming dark of the sunless, moonless sky. The landscape was split clearly into the Outlands and the Grid. The Outlands were probably the closest the Grid could get to the wild, chaotic nature of the Digiworld. It was a clear line that separated the two sides. A very clear line. The Grid was smooth and sleek. A perfect machine that ran like clockwork, a section of cities, of civilization set into opaque glossy darkness, defined by a series of neon colored lines. The Outlands were jumbled piles and cliffs of rocky raw data from which the Grid had been carved. There were paths cut into the landscape, but programs rarely ventured out that far. The perfect hiding spot for a self-exiled creator.

The Grid was a case study of isolation. It had no contact with the outside world for almost two decades. The fast paced information highway of the world wide web had been born, matured and had zipped right on by without even noticing the server that had fallen by the way side. It languished there, no new input to incorporate into its design. Because that was the downside of being so User orientated when there were no Users. The Grid couldn't really  _do_ anything for itself. It did not regulate itself as the Digiworld did. It needed to be directed, either by a program(C.L.U) or by a User. And with no User input, there was nothing there. Nothing to help pitch it forward, to take it to the next step, the next level.

 

Until now.

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the most part, Digimon Tamers compliant. Sam is just the very first digimon tamer due to luck and connections. But he's chilling mainly in America for the events of the season.  
> Agumon is roughly the size of the Agumon from the first movie. Working on the basis that as the first digimon his data isn't as compressed so he's not the same smaller size as later agumons. He comes up to full grown Sam's shoulder in height. He also doesn't talk as much, but Sam can tell what he means because life long bros.


End file.
